


a dukedom large enough

by astronicht (1Boo)



Series: a dukedom large enough [1]
Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: (past) Varice/Numair/Ozorne, Multi, Numair Salmalin & Veralidaine Sarrasri - Freeform, Slice of Life, Use of Google Translate, it wouldn't let me tag, parenting a dragon is hard, so there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 03:01:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13941171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1Boo/pseuds/astronicht
Summary: In which a winter burrow is dug (metaphorically) and a dragon finds a bottle of myrrh. Numair tries to be a good adult, with mixed returns.





	a dukedom large enough

**Author's Note:**

> working title: "numair tries", which also could've been the entire summary. Tragically in these first parts there isn't much of what I got into writing this verse for, which i believe I described on twitter as 'a torrid 3-way affair between varice, prince ozorne, & numair'. We'll get there. 
> 
> Set the September after book 1, a full year before Wolf Speaker begins.
> 
> Me, poor man, my library  
> Was dukedom large enough.  
> ― Shakespeare, The Tempest

Numair Salmalín wasn’t a teacher when he met the girl. No one would let him near a student and no student thought he’d have any knack for it, even if they weren’t scared he’d accidentally blow them up. The last time Numair had really taught, occasional lectures aside, he’d been her age. At thirteen he took his classes with seventeen-year-olds and was tutoring his own age group: all those little children sent from across the empire with a sniff of magic in their hands.

They had him give up tutoring quickly enough. His lessons were accelerated. He was to focus on his potential.

(By the time Numair was thirteen, he wasn’t much worried about “his potential” being much of a limiting factor)

They let him grow his hair out when they gave him his red robes. He liked how it looked, like a froth on a black wave, like electricity lived in his skin - and it did. Oh, it did.

A strange confession: even with all of that, she’s the thirteen-year-old he wishes he’d been.

At thirteen Numair, obviously and by definition, had no idea that someday he would wish he’d been less Arram-clever and more Daine-smart. Maybe it wouldn’t have gone quite so badly, had he been anything like Daine.

Of course, he wasn’t, and things really went very poorly for a while there.

***

Numair hadn’t really put up with a person in his space for a prolonged period of time since the days of Varice and Prince Ozorne, and wasn’t _that_ still a strange thought to think. He’d offered his home to Daine anyway, but Daine opted to finish out her summer with the Riders. In a compromise, they developed a lessons-by-wingmail system that left Onua adding exasperated postscripts on Daine’s letters. Daine’s penmanship improved. One evening Numair realized why: she was copying the script in her anatomy book. A little Gallan girl learning to write those letters that in Tortall they liked to call Common Tongue, the shape of her words modeled after some long-dead academic - it was almost funny. Tortall had no idea what was coming for it.

No one had let him have any real students until this one, and to be honest he hadn’t asked for them. This wasn’t teaching young things with some Wild magic a few control and breathing techniques. There, he’d been content that he’d done his duty as a specialist in the field, and meandered off. Daine though, she was fantastic! So fantastically clever, so fantastically powerful, he just wanted to drag her around and shove her in the face of anyone not appreciative enough and yell - “Take a look at what she’s done!”

From afar he watched her stubborn, self-conscious push through the tiers of standard Tortallan education he set up for her alongside her magic lessons, and kept his patient silence. Her desperate improvement seemed - private, a pinched feeling under his ribs. He knew what it was to have to fight for the basics in a foreign place. He didn’t used to, when he was thirteen and everyone helpfully placed the world at his feet just to see him make it tremble, but he did now.

Semi-secretly, Numair could admit that he still had all the faults of that boy in the red silk with his mane of hair like a black corona. He could admit, when Daine was too far away to glimpse it in his face, just what it was in her that impressed him the most, despite his better judgment. What made that leaping thing in him flare up and burn in response.

It was about, well - he felt so predictable. It was the healing of a baby stillborn. It was a heart stopped through will alone. A flock of birds in a marsh far away, screaming her screams, the sun beating through their flight-feathers, golden. A boiling in the sea, just over the horizon. The way her magic sung in his sight.

Living things came to her call and so did Numair. He was all too happy to.

“From anyone else, that speech might be alarming,” Onua said when he rambled is way through all of this.

It was their standard adults-get-drunk-and-do-chores-badly night, reinstated now that the Riders’ summer season was ending and Buri and Onua were back at the palace, spending too long in the steam baths and catching up on Corus gossip. Numair was embroidering a vest, K’mir style, with hawk patterns and the border design of Onua’s motherhouse. He was putting cleaning spells in it for her, which Onua needed a lot more than protection.

“Fuck off and talk about my problems,” Buri interjected. She was seated next to Onua, helping clean tack. Her small, clever hands gleamed with the oil she was rubbing into leather. Sarge had brought strawberry wine, bottles under each wide arm, and they were drinking from the smooth glass necks. Onua and Buri had undone their long braids and their hair hung thick and black around their waists.

Numair agreeably fucked off and talked about Buri’s problems, which seemed to amount to Thayet’s level of attractiveness ruining Buri for all other women, a subject which lead into Buri being shot down by Pirra of Jorvik.

“Weeks of pining, wasted,” grumbed Buri.

“You’ve only been back in Corus for three days,” Onua reminded her drily.

“I dreamed of her till I got here,” Buri replied, deadpan.

Numair grandly passed Buri the nearest bottle.

“To the many lusts of Buriram Tourakom, and the end of summer flings!” he said, raising Onua’s bottle.

“To Lady Wosface, for not telling her noble husband that it was you who kept her from the table at the Carthaki’s farewell banquet,” Onua toasted him back, pointedly, her dark eyes wicked, smile crooked.

Numair was affronted. In his distraction, he had to rip out a few stitches of embroidery, and then Sarge stole his - Onua’s - bottle. “Well, Jon _and_ George told me to try to leave before the third course, so I was technically following orders. Anyway, she’s been engaged for ages, how was I supposed to know they’d finally made it official?”

Onua may have muttered something to the effect of wedding bands. But she relaxed back, half using Sarge as a headrest.

“What a damn summer. Despite all, I think I’ll miss it when it goes. I’ll miss Daine most of all, though.”

“Daine? Our little sweetheart?” rumbled Sarge, who Numair knew had once seen Daine pin a man to a tree by the hand at twenty paces with a bow that wasn’t even her own. She’d written Numair after and said that she’d feel awful if he lost the hand, but she’d feel worse if he touched the ponies. _Our little sweetheart,_ indeed. “Who’s stealing her away?” Sarge demanded.

“You, apparently,” said Onua, and Numair was surprised to realize that she was looking at him.

“I… don’t recall?” he hazarded.

The room stared him down.

Finally, Onua laughed and slid off Sarge and onto the floor, her hair pooling around her. Tahoi, lazing by the hearth, whined and licked her face.

“Well,” she said, patting Tahoi, “I guess I assumed that you had stolen her away, or convinced her at least, but it looks like she went ahead and made the decision over our heads.”

“Well, I hardly mind, of course,” Numair said faintly. Distantly, he was bubbly, pleased -- like the popular boy had sat next to him in the mess hall, he thought, annoyed. Only, the last time that exact scenario had occured, the popular boy has been called Prince Ozorne, and they all knew how that had gone. Or, well, Numair knew. That was already one person too many.

He sighed and centered himself. Strawberry wine. Bad embroidery, well-woven spells. The end of summer, and an unexpected houseguest for the tower.

He wondered, idly, how Daine would like it there.

***

Daine didn’t like it.

He’d been imagining, he didn’t know, the isolation or the drafts or her opinion of half-done experiments tossed about, oozing the occasional vapor, being the problem. In retrospect, he was an idiot.

He let her have her pick of tower rooms; she took the lowest bedchamber for her things - it was on the second storey - promptly ignored it, and slept in the woodshed for the first week, which was how long it took Numair to realize, and put his foot down.

She trudged up to the lookout room for lessons, or to his bedchambers when that got too chilled, and spent her free time out in the woods, expertly gleaning the early autumn berries and wild-grown chestnuts. She seemed unbothered by the loneliness of the tower, but then, she might not consider herself alone. She was very busy with Kitten, and had Cloud for company along with Numair’s horses, Spots and Mangle, not to mention the cacophony of wildlife scurrying about in preparation for colder months ahead.

His tiny barn was hidden by a rise, cleverly built into rock. He thought it was probably what she liked best; a perfect mix of paddock and den, which was a shame because he’d only had it built that way so it didn’t take away from the looming impression of the tall, dark tower skimming over wind-bent trees.

Then, she left the lookout room twice in tears because his ridiculously, insanely expensive glass window panes were apparently a death trap for small birds, which he had never noticed before. It was at this point that his idiocy began to dawn on him.

Numair’s private rooms were done up in West Carthaki style, lined on all sides with plush pattern-woven rugs. There were rugs on the walls, too, and copper teapots under conjured black flame. Pillows were strewn across the floors, and there were raised areas of floor like the nook that housed his bed, but no chairs, and only low tables, intricately carved. He worried that she, a child of the Gallan mountains, would find it all too alien.

She was just annoyed that whenever they sat down, the carpets gave her a static shock.

While Daine and Cloud and Kitten were on a day trip to Pirate’s Swoop, Numair wrote a panicked letter to Onua and roped up a sturdy trellis to Daine’s room, and replanted an overgrown star jasmine under it.

Before Onua’s reply could feasibly come - and he’d been called wasteful with magic, but running Onua’s reserves low with a fire-call from this distance over whether or not his student liked his stupid wizard’s tower was not the point to which he wished to push that image - Daine and Kitten and Cloud were trotting back into view.

Daine was visibly pleased with the trellis setup, which was already a bit of a well-beaten path for the local wildlife by the next morning. She trotted away to the nearest little hamlet and came back with a mattress stuffed with sweet late-summer straw, and even accepted Numair’s help in setting it up as a nest for Kitten. She held conference with the local birds about the danger of the tower, which for Numair mostly meant that for the first time ever he didn’t have to worry about getting pooped on by a seagull when he went out onto the thin walkway that circled the lookout room.

For a week, it was almost going well.

Then of course, Kitten promptly got into one of those half-finished experiments Numair had been vaguely worrying about before, and drank an entire bottle of myrrh.

He found out via the chilling, “Numair!” Daine screamed from downstairs. “Come quick! It’s Kitten, Numair!”

He hadn’t heard her scream like that since the summer.

Numair did his best to fall down the stairs entirely in an attempt to move faster.

He rarely spent time downstairs. It was Daine’s area, like the tower top was his. It was odd that they lived together, the only two humans in this tower, yet tidied themselves away from each other.

When he burst into her second-floor apartments, he found that if the top of the tower was Western Carthaki, this was a little sliver of rural Galla, with a bonus family of muskrats curled up under a chair. Daine had left his bottles of oddities on the shelves, however, and one was in tell-tale shards on the floor. Next to these was Daine, holding an annoyed baby dragon around the middle, who was straining her muzzle towards the pool of oil. The smell hit him quickly: myrrh was not the worst bottle, but still not the best.

“I think she drank most of it,” Daine told him, panting, pale. Numair, momentarily confused, realized suddenly why she had screamed, was still so upset. Of course, he thought of myrrh as a medicine or a scent, not to be ingested in large quantities but still a largely benign entity. Daine did not share his biases; Daine had once run with wolves, and knew quite well that myrrh was poison to many animals, including dogs. That it was alright for humans did not matter much to her, when her charge was hardly human herself.

Dragons, of course, were hard to predict. Numair was still surprised by the intensity of the cold wash of fear that started at the back of his neck and swept over him. If someone had asked him, he’d have said Kitten was like a pet or a young friend. But really, dragon or not, she was a baby, and she’d been left in Daine’s care. Daine had been left - or, sort of put herself - in Numair’s care, so he was responsible for all of it.

Enough thinking, idiot.

“Daine - Daine, bring her to my bedroom!” he called over a loud thumping downstairs. Cloud was never latched into the barn the way Numair’s horses were, and had likely darted out at Daine’s first scream. Currently, she was was taking offense at the tower’s front door.

Numair stuck his head out the window. It was almost full night, and he could barely make out the tops of the windy pines against the sky; below he couldn’t see Cloud at all. He still felt foolish talking to a pony like she would bother to listen, but needs must.

“Cloud, it’s alright! Kitten ate some myrrh and we’re taking care of it, Daine will be in touch once she calms down.” The thumping desisted with a snort.

Daine shot him a grateful glance and bundled up Kitten in her arms. Numair put a hand on her shoulder to guide her as quickly as possible up the stairs, and the three of them spilled out of breath into his room. Kitten leapt down to sulk in a corner, her scales turning a gray, confused shade. Numair did not know if this was the myrrh or a reaction to their panic.

“Come on _fatat,_ _fatat saghira,_ come here by the fire,” Numair coaxed Kitten. “ _Quth saghiruh_ , darling, come on.” Daine threw the door closed and in a clatter of steps rushed across the floor, knocking his teapot with a heel as she passed. It spilled onto a book, but it was a cheaper book. He ignored it. Daine took up the bellows and built his fire, then flopped down onto the stone hearth. Kitten was eventually coaxed over towards her, and when at the last minute it looked like she might try to run away again, Numair grabbed her around her middle and deposited her in Daine’s lap.

“There was a little about this in my books, but not much,” Daine said, eyes on Kitten, lip between her teeth. “If she was a dog, I’d give her a purgative to try to get it out. I don’t even know for sure if it’ll hurt her, but - lots of animals can get poisoned by it. Gods!” she yelled suddenly, slapping a closed fist on the hearth. A dull thud; her hand came away smudged with ash. “I know why I don’t know, I know she’s special, but I’ve learned _so much_ this year, and I can help so many more people, but she’s mine and she’s depending on me and it’s so frustrating not to be able to _do_ anything, Numair!”

“I know,” he said, feeling as helpless as she looked, and trying hard not to let it show on his face. There was no real reason to hold it close; serenity of expression, whenever possible, was nothing more than an old habit. Jon and George found it useful in his service to the throne, so had never tried to disabuse him of it. Gods, maybe he even looked adult and in control to her right now.

He wanted to pat her back, but didn’t want to come off as patronizing. “We will focus more on researching dragon physiology this winter, Daine, I swear it. We’ll need to go to Corus for midwinter anyhow; I’ll show you the libraries there. For now--” he broke off and stood, crossed quickly the the nook across the room from the one which held his bed. He pushed aside the heavy curtains and pulled out a jar of dried herbs and a small tin measuring spoon.

He paused. If it were a human who had drunk poison, he’d mix this with the tea. Making a little dragon drink tea that she might not want to drink sounded like an impossible riddle, however. He cast his eye about; on the low table near the door was a bowl of sweet yellow September apples, fresh from Daine’s latest gleaning expedition. He rushed back and grabbed one, and held out his hand, unthinking. Into his palm, clever Daine silently put her beltknife, and with it he carved a hole into the apple, and stuffed the smallest dose into it.

“Like a clove-apple at Midwinter,” murmured Daine. As tense as he was, Numair felt himself huff a laugh.

"She's too young to go kissing," grumbed Numair, nonsensically. She smiled wryly back at him, then returned her entire focus to the little dragon in her lap.

Kitten was watching them, snuffling a little. Numair crouched down and met Kitten’s eyes and turned the apple in his hand; on the opposite side, he took a careful bite. Then he tossed the apple to Kitten, hoping against hope that she would trust him.

Kitten caught the apple delicately in her mouth, but instead of snapping it up, a single clawed paw came up to help her dislodge it from her sharp teeth. Once on the ground she nosed it, sniffing.

“C’mon, Kit,” said Daine, taking it up before it became a plaything, “it’s good for you. I hope.”

Kitten, unfortunately, was not entirely convinced. With some coaxing, Daine managed to get Kitten to take a bite, but that was the limit. When Kitten whined and shoved the drugged apple away, and screeched when either of them tried to offer it again, Numair and Daine’s resigned eyes met over her head. Kitten hiccuped and burped a puff of smoke; Daine cringed and went to stroke the soft scales over her ribs. They’d run into the wall that was the willfulness of a young dragon before, but never when there was any real danger.

There was another small burp of smoke. Numair was pretty sure this was going to be a dragon thing.

“I’ll call Alanna with my Gift if you want me to,” he said quietly, under the crack-hiss of the hearth. In the room above them he could hear the first spattering of a squall of early fall rain hitting the lookout’s glass windows. “She has the most experience as a healer.”

“What do you think?” Daine asked, lip between her teeth.

“While you still require lessons in your magic, your experience and practical expertise in diagnosing a sick non-human outpaces my own. Overriding your instincts and opinions with my own at this juncture would only leave me remiss in my duty to help care for Kitten and my responsibilities - sorry, I’m talking too much.”

He rubbed his face. By putting it like that he was being honest, but he was also levelling the field between them and perhaps putting too much of a decision on Daine alone. A lot of the time, Daine was in practical terms an equal: intellectually, in terms of wilderness survival (in terms of pure raw power, his brain whispered). But treating her like an intelligent being and treating her like an adult were two seperate things, and as a teacher he felt the crux of his work was balancing between them to give her what she needed to grow.

Numair thought, annoyed, that a little more experience in dealing with students or anyone at all younger than himself would have been helpful. Unfortunately, Numair had been the sort of thirteen-year-old who did not have any friends younger than himself, or even in his own age group. Even Varice and Ozorne had been two years older; Alanna and Thayet outranked him by six years and enjoyed it; and Onua, Jon, and George were comfortably in their thirties.

In truth, Numair was used to being the young one, the brilliant one, maybe something of the darling of the group. He’d also spent the last six years learning not to take himself quite so seriously, so hopefully he could stop thinking about himself now and actually pay attention to the situation.

Fortunately, Daine was growing used to his long rambles, whether they were verbal or merely awkwardly stretched silences. She’d just been using the time to think.

“I’ll send a note to the Lioness,” Daine said, chewing a thumbnail.

“Stop that,” Numair said absently; Daine would stop chewing her nail for about half a minute, at most.

Ignoring him, Daine continued, “That way, if she does know something she knows to warn us, but we don’t wake her up in the middle of the night somewhere.” Numair blinked and wondered how late it was, exactly. Both he and Daine tended to stay awake into the night, and struggle in the mornings. He never sent her to bed unless she’d exhausted herself magically. “And I should meditate, and try to see if I need to heal her,” Daine added more decisively. “I should’ve done that first, instead of running around like a spooked goose with no brains in its head. Shh, Kitten, it’s alright.”

Kitten was squirming again, and Numair crouched down beside them, put a hand on Kitten and scolded gently, “Be good, _Quth-Saghiruh_. Let Daine get a good look at you, there you go.”

He spelled her very gently; not quite enough to make her sleep, but enough that she would be calm enough to decide to sleep on her own. Daine watched him do it and stroked down Kitten’s back. There was a caught moment for Numair, one of those little snags in time where if feels like your heart beats twice. He never, never suggested like this in front of anyone, even if it was just spelling a baby towards comfort. It was a controlling magic, insidious, but Daine did not blink. Maybe she had missed the tendril of his Gift. She settled herself to sit tailor-style, a little further from the hearth so that she could have the soft carpets under her, and Numair sat down opposite mirroring her out of habit.

He was about to close his eyes and use the time for his own meditation practice of the day, when he surprised himself by saying, “Wait - will you let me ride along?”

“What d’you mean?” Daine asked, frowning and stroking Kittens head.

“Like - similar to when I put up your shield, when we were both in the magic together. Like that. If it’s possible and you’re comfortable with it, I’d like to be party to your examination of Kitten. Not from a lack of trust in your abilities, but to satisfy my own concern.”

She smiled tightly at him. “It sounds alright, but I’m not sure I want you in my head. No offense.”

“None taken,” he said easily. “Though I should specify that I won’t be in your head, in this scenario. Just watching what you do, seeing what you see. Magically speaking.”

“It sounds fair strange,” she said. “But if you can do it just like that, then you go ahead.”

“Give me a minute, please,” he said, eyes closing, already searching for the core of himself. He reached out a hand and found she had already held hers out; she knew the aid of contact in this sort of magic. Distantly, he was proud of how well she learned, and how much better she was getting at intuiting the next step in a process.

Then he was in the fire - his own - and searching out the bramble of golden tendrils that was Daine.

So he hadn’t done this before specifically, but what of it? Most of what he and Daine had done with Wild Magic - mostly Daine, obviously - had never been done before. He raced along her shifting loops of golden flame, and in the process sang the rest of the world into view, like he had done for Daine months ago at the undine’s pool. Magic surged in everything; the dusky room glowed. And in the center of it was Daine and Kitten.

Instead of reaching towards her core he followed the flow of her magic, and when it met Kitten he was proved right: like this, he could sense what she sensed. Thanks to a single curious dragon kit and a bottle of myrrh, Numair could have published at least twelve academic papers alone.

He felt that his thoughts were pushing at Daine’s concentration and consciously pulled himself into the present. That meant pulling himself into Kitten, where Daine was.

It was strange, feeling the way blood moved through Kitten, the way her lungs fluttered, the stirring dragon magic deep in her and the irritation in her first stomach. The detail of her was endless, tiny; for some reason it made him want to cry. She was so small and wrapped up, like a seed curled in tight. Over years she would slowly unfurl for them. He found in the next moment that he was happy; delighted. She was such a marvel, this little dragonet. Intelligent and babyish, curious like a human child and built in her bones like a magical thing.

 _You’re distracting me_ , he felt Daine think, and pulled away to be a silent whisp of an observer as she poked and prodded at Kitten’s digestive organs, at the composition of her blood, the temperature of her body.

They must have been at it a long time. They came back to themselves with a gasp, and Numair couldn’t see himself but Daine was flushed and sweating with exertion, even though the fire had burned down.

“I couldn’t find anything that looked really wrong,” Daine said finally, once she’d caught her breath. She looked down at Kitten sleeping peacefully on her lap. There was a tiny burp and a whisp of smoke drifted out of her nostrils. Numair flinched a little but Daine rolled her eyes.

“I _think_ that’s her body digesting it, of all things. It’s hard to tell, though. She’s so different.”

“You did very well,” Numair said. “It was fascinating to watch you work.”

“S’not a real healing,” Daine sighed. “It tired me out almost like one, though.”

“There are more apples on the table,” Numair suggested. “No one will miss them, I promise.” He winked and she laughed, tired, and got up to come back with the entire bowl.

“Here,” she said, and tossed him one. The first bite was juicy and bitter, and he realized he was thirsty as well. The water basin was across the room and the tea had long since soaked into the carpet; oh well.

“Do you want to sleep up here with her?” Numair asked on impulse. “That way we’re near the medicines and the fire, and we can both keep an eye on her through the night.”

“Sure,” sighed Daine. “I’d sleep on stone if it meant not dealing with the stairs in the dark while trying to hold her. Will you write that note for th’ Lioness? I’m fair tired enough that I don’t think it’d be legible. And I need to call a bird.”

Numair nodded and did as he was asked. When he was done he found that a screech owl was nosing its way through his closed (but unlatched) shutters. Daine kept up a mumbled one-sided conversation with the owl for about five minutes, until it was deemed an acceptable time for Numair to hand her the note, which he did, and this was attached to the owl gently. Numair opened the shutters properly and caught a rush of feathers and a glimpse of the screech owl winging off south towards Pirate’s Swoop. He closed them again quickly, but had already been rained on somewhat thoroughly.

He pulled out some deliciously heavy goose down blankets and laid them out by the fire, with a few quilts on top for good measure. Daine nodded her thanks.

Numair reached across the hearth to carefully readjust one of Kitten’s dwarfed wings where it had tucked awkwardly under her stomach as she slept. “There you are, _fatat saghira_ , that’s better.”

“Y’call her that s’times,” Daine said around her second apple. “What does it mean? Is that a language used in Tortall?”

“It is used in Tortall, actually, among the Bazhir tribes to the west of here. Remember all those complaints from the Riders over who had to take the desert route this year?”

“Oh, yes. They had to make sure the ponies that went didn’t have heavy coats.”

Trust Daine to remember geopolitics in terms of the ponies.

“I didn’t learn it from the Bazhir, though,” he continued, though she hadn’t asked. “Actually, we can barely understand each other if a tribesman and I do meet. My dialect is decidedly Carthaki.”

“What is it you call her sometimes, ‘ya...ya nijmat alsabah’?” asked Daine, wiping sweat from her forehead. He was surprised she remembered that one well enough to repeat it. He was fairly certain he hadn’t used it tonight.

“‘My morning star’, I think it translates to. It’s… I don’t know. A small-name, a sweet-name, like you’d call a partner or a child.”

“Did you grow up speaking Carthaki?” she asked, arranging Kitten in the nest by the hearth. Once Kitten was secure she reached up the the tie that bound her hair and took it down. It bounced, nutty brown and wildly curled around her shoulders; she sighed.

“Do you need a brush?” he asked, and directed her to the dresser to her left when she hummed and nodded.

“Yes, and no,” he said in reply. “There isn’t a single Carthaki language; I spoke the dialect of Thak used in the capital and the dialect common throughout the north. Despite being common in the capital, it’s not what would be considered a majority language in Carthak. Especially given the Carthaki tendency to take over small independant southern nations. There are many languages in the Empire. And - when I was very little I spoke Tyranic.”

“Why?” She had brushed out her hair quickly, impatiently, even though his ‘brush’ was the wide-toothed comb that was the only thing that worked on his hair and she was obviously new to it. Already she was braiding it tightly against the night.

“I grew up in Tyra. I don’t remember it very well, I’m afraid. Mostly in my head…” he tapped his temple, “is Carthaki Thak or Tortallan.”

Daine studied him for a moment, gray eyes serious, like if she looked hard enough she’d be able to see all the tangled languages in his head. Like she’d be able to watch him parse them as easily as he’d watched her slip her magic inside Kitten’s muscle and bone.

“In Galla she’d be called Kotenok,” Daine said finally, surprising him. “Where I -- where we lived, they spoke it all, though. Frontierland, you gotta speak Gallan and Scanran and Tortallan Common just fine. I knew a few people the next village over that spoke K’mir, though they do it a lot different than Onua and Buri.”

“Again, I suppose that would be a dialectical issue,” Numair said. “Oh, did she wake up?”

“No,” said Daine. “She twitches like that in her sleep.”

Numair hummed. “Kotenok,” he said, “I like that. I don’t actually know any Gallan. Maybe you’ll have to teach me.”

She frowned, and tidied her apple core away by the side of the hearth. Numair assumed that somewhere, a mouse was waiting in deep excitement for its prize.

“What use could you have for Gallan?”

“You never know,” Numair said, banking the flue. “At the palace especially, the more languages the better.”

“And here you spend all your time correctin’ my grammar,” complained Daine dryly, tugging her blankets into a better tangle and kicking off her socks and soft slippers. “I could’ve just told you it’s a Gallan-Tortallan _dialect_ and kept talkin’ like I do.” Numair suspected her accent was being pushed to its limit for his dubious benefit. He tried to fight down a smile and crossed the room to the nook that held his bed. He hesitated at the curtains that held it away from view, however. Daine sent him a questioning glance from the knot of blankets by the fire.

“Wake me if I’m asleep and you’re worried,” he said finally. “I’m happy to watch her, really I am. I intend to read for a bit, anyway.”

“Oh trust me,” grinned Daine tiredly, “If she starts belching fire instead of smoke, you can be sure I’ll wake you quick as anything, and you can help me explain to the Lioness how we burned down your tower.”

Numair laughed quietly at the unexpected candor and said, “Goodnight, Daine. Goodnight, Kotenok.”

“Tell the nice man goodnight, Kit,” mumbled Daine. Numair lit the candle inside his bed nook, but his fingers slid numb off the pages of his book almost as soon as he opened it. He remembered listening to Kitten’s little whistling sighs, and Daine’s fidgets, and then just the rain hissing on stone, the rain dancing on glass, the rain washing away the end of summer and blowing in the start of something else.

Eventually, all of the tower slept.

**Author's Note:**

> You might notice that one of my least fav tropes in med-fantasy is the whole Common language thing. It offends me on many levels. However, instead of inventing languages I was equally lazy and in the spirit of the Tortallan universe, just ripped off real ones.
> 
> North/East Carthak = Arabic (google translate version, deep apologies). Numair is (hopefully) just calling her 'little one' and 'kitten'  
> Galla = Russian. Fortunately one of my 5 words of Russian IS kitten, thanks to following russian insta accounts, so that's accurate.


End file.
